This week T was doing a reading lesson about the short letter 'u'. Oh it was such a crazy lesson for him. He knew the letter sound. He would tell the sound of all the letters in the word but when it came time to blending them, he would say the word with the short 'o' sound. For instance he would have the word 'bug' say 'b-u-g bog'. I am not sure that this is something that would have been caught right away if he was having this same lesson in a group setting. He has developed some incorrect habits when it comes to his speech because he doesn't have top teeth so I am not sure if nobody ever thought to make sure that even if his teeth weren't there, that he was still using his mouth in the proper formation to make the sounds. We do a lot of correcting as I am a firm believer that if you aren't pronouncing your words properly, you aren't going to master reading them properly either. Well, we had a few days in a row this week that we could focus on the lesson at his pace. Lots of practice and today when he was reading his fluency page for the lesson, he only switched out the 'o' for the 'u' a couple of times rather than every time. We celebrated. It brought us closer (I would like to believe) and I got to share in this with him.
I am loving the math program we are using. CO is good at math...if he applies himself. That is probably one of his biggest struggles. He SO bad wants to be able to play and do school at the same time. Something that is rarely successful. The program we are using is set up so that they watch a lesson on a DVD with me and then they spend the rest of the week working on practicing what they have learning and reviewing what they have learned thus far. My goal for CO is to watch the lesson Monday and write the lesson test on Friday. Well this week, I was seeing that he wasn't grasping the lesson 100% by mid week and rather than sticking to the schedule for him to write the test today, I made up some flash cards to give him lots more practice and review. He will probably not write his test until the middle of next week so we can practice with the flash cards some more. This is one of the reasons why I home school. So that my boy's can learn at their own pace. In a group school setting, he would probably have started to fall behind and it would have been up to me to spend the evenings trying to catch him up when we were both tired, he would be frustrated and deflated because he would not have been on par with his peers potentially causing him to get farther and farther behind. It would mean we wouldn't be spending our evenings reading going on grand adventures while reading chapter books together but rather struggling through homework.
The math program explains thing in a fun way. For example a couple of weeks ago it was adding with 9. So, 9+5, 9+6, etc. The way they explain it is that 9 wants to be a 10 because being 10 is VERY cool. So it uses the one hole that it has as a vacuum and steals one from the other number, so with 9+5....9 wants to be a ten...make a quick suction noise 'slurp' and that leaves 5 as a four...and the nine as a 10 meaning 14. I am probably explaining it not as clearly. So the lesson after that was adding with 8. 8 has two holes so it does two 'slurps'. It is fun for a boy to make vacuum noises to do his math.
